Ways to Boost Your Income at Professional Services Firms
The first few years in a professional services firm are difficult. You're constantly learning new things and developing new skills to make yourself more marketable for a promotion or a new job. Depending on your ambitions and goals, the standard compensation you get for working at a professional services firm may not be enough to satisfy you. While there are numerous side hustles and other strategies to make money on the side of your job, today I'm going to specifically talk about ways that you can increase your income working at a professional services firm (like a public accounting firm).
If you want your professional services firm to pay you more, you simply need to make them more money. This can be done in 3 different ways:
Becoming more experienced and marketable - professional services bill you out based on your experience and credentials. Getting promoted, obtaining a professional license, or acquiring new skill sets are different ways you can improve your marketability. Typically, the increase in compensation for this area comes in the form of raises and bonuses.
Recruitment - no matter how marketable you are, the firm is limited to how much money they can make from your time. However, the firm can make more money by having more staff to bill to clients. Most professional services firms will have some sort of recruitment bonus or incentive program to encourage current employees to bring in new employees from their network. The extra compensation for recruitment will range depending on the level of experience of the person you bring in, typically starting around $1,000 less experienced personnel and going up in excess of $20,000 for very experienced personnel.
Business development - firms make money from servicing clients and bringing in a client relationship to the firm is a great way to add value and make the firm money. Generally, firms will incentivize employees to bring in new business by promising to pay out a certain percentage of the collections from these new clients to the person who brought them in. While not easy to do at first, many successful professionals capitalize on this incentive by building relationships and bringing in business over time.
How Do I Start Making More Money at Professional Services Firms?
It's important to understand that focusing your energy on any combination of the above areas will yield a positive result. However, you should also know that the time between your initial investment and the eventual payoff can differ greatly among these alternatives. My best advice is to be deliberate and start early.
Be deliberate - you have taken the first step to increasing your compensation at a professional services firm by reading this article and understanding how things work. Next, you will need to plan out where you are going to spend your time and energy across these three areas. Most people will dedicate nearly all of their time to making themselves more marketable because that value can be realized at another job as well as at their current firm, and it's not necessarily wrong to do that. However, it is still important to plant the seeds for the other two areas as well. Keeping business cards handy and reaching out to former colleagues and classmates can be a great way to network for recruiting and business development.
Start early - so much professional development and networking stems from actions taken years in the past. Go out of your way to define the skills you want to have in the next five years, take the time to meet everyone in your class, and don't hesitate to hand out a business card to someone that could use your help in a few years. You will be surprised how much of an impact these little actions can have over the course of multiple years.
There you have it! While every firm might have its own terminology or different way of administering these programs, the concepts are almost universal. If you were looking to increase your compensation at your professional services firm, look at these areas and see where you want to focus next. Good luck!